Google always have to trade off the balance between authority and topicality, for the lack of the better word. If somebody types in ‘viagra’, which is one of the most spammed terms in the world, you want something that’s about Viagra, not just something that has a lot of authority, like Newsweek, Times that is talking about writing an article with one mention of Viagra, where they say ‘Oh, this is something like Viagra’, you know, just a throw off phrase.

You want authority, sites that are trustworthy, that are reputable. But you also want topicality, you don’t want something that is off topic. You want it to be about what the user typed in.

We try to find the good balance there, so I would try to say, have a well-rounded site. Great content has to be foundation of a good site, because mediocre tends not to attract exceptional links by itself.

If you try to get exceptional links on a really, really crappy content, you’re going to be pushing uphill, it’s going to be harder to get those links. You’re going to have to do stuff that we consider bad for the web, like paying for them. It’s much better to have great content where you get those links naturally, and then you get both – you get great content and you get great links, than trying to have something that is really not that interesting and try to push, push and bug people, send out those spammy emails and ask for links, those sorts of things.

You want to have a well-rounded site, and one of the best ways to do it is to have fantastic, interesting, useful content, great resources, great information and then that naturally attracts the links.

Search engines want to reflect the fact that web thinks that you are interesting or important or helpful.

Related posts:

1. If you have inbound links from reputable sites, but those sites do not show up in a link:webname.com search, does this mean you are not getting any “credit” in Google’s eyes for having inbound links?
2. Do you feel that the widespread and blanket use of nofollow tags is devaluing Google’s search algorithms? Examples such as Wikipedia, where ALL external links are nofollow. Does Wikipedia mean nothing to Google’s algorithms? Do Google take into account quality factors from nofollowed links when the links come from the well established authority websites, such as Wikipedia?
3. Does anchor text carry through all 301 redirects? Will there be a penalty for sites that do this as their sole way of link building?

Well, we always try to maximize the quality, the relevance, the accuracy of our index. You want to make a distinction between crawling and indexing.

Sitemap submission does not guarantee that we will crawl the URLs on that list. It is very helpful to help us discover new URLs, or to make canonicalization decisions.

But we don’t guarantee that if you submit a Sitemap, we’re going to crawl it. There have been some people who did some experiments where they saw that happen, but I’m not going to confirm or deny that, and policies can always change on how we do use Sitemap submissions.

Crawling and indexing is different. If you do a ping, a lot of the times Google will come and crawl you, but often it’s Google blog search.

If you’re doing those WordPress, Weblogs, or feedburner pings, those pings are often the sort of things that are blogs. Blog search might come and crawl you five minutes later, but then if you show up, you might show up on blog search corpus, not on our main web index corpus.

Just because you’re getting crawled doesn’t mean you’re getting some kind of index boost or anything like that.

We do, sort of, rationally decide what’s the best quality of data, how do we get that, sometimes is crawling that immediately, like with blog search; so you have very fast, very real-time sort of results. Sometimes it’s taking Sitemaps. That might result crawling at a different pace or you might not get any boost at all, but do use that information in lots of ways to help us improve cannonicalization and try to help us improve the quality of our index.

So, I wouldn’t say ‘Oh, ping! That’s the way to automatically get crawled’, or anything like that. If you make a great content, you get to be well-known, we’ll probably crawl you relatively frequently and see updated content any time you make a good change.

Related posts:

1. Are different sites treated differently? E.G. are blogs treated differently than e-commerce sites? Does Google attempt to figure out the context of a site or are all websites equal?
2. Is there a limit to the number of pages that Google will index from one site?
3. Does Googlebot use inference when spidering – having crawled site.com/article/page1.htm and /page2.htm, can it guess at the existence of a /page3.htm and crawl it? Or does it stick entirely to what it finds via the link graph and/or Sitemaps/feeds?

Boy, that would be a really big undertaking! I think it would be fun. We joked around the pool table about wouldn’t it be great if we crawled the web, found all the images and ran OCR on all the images on the web. That would be a lot of work.

I think it would be a fine idea, but I’m not sure if you should count in the short term from Google.

Related posts:

1. Does using a class or an id in a header tag:

   text

   instead of using plain headers:

   text

   interfere with the way search engines see and understand headings?
2. What impact does “page bloat” have on Google rankings? Most of the winners in SEO seem to have very simple pages (very few images, HTML-only design), sometimes to the detriment to the user in a poorly designed page.
3. Does anchor text carry through all 301 redirects? Will there be a penalty for sites that do this as their sole way of link building?

Alright, Quentin (person who asked the question). Let me lay a little bit of schooling on you. It actually turns out that we used to not use the meta description at all. We would only use the snippet appropriate to the specific search query.

And only in recent years have we added it where if you have a meta description, we will sometimes choose that meta description over a little snippet from within the page. In fact, it is moving in the other direction. We started out as only having stuff from within the page, and now we are a little more likely to sometimes use the meta description.

But, we don’t use it all the time. If we think it’s useful for the query, don’t make the same meta description on every single page, just as a cookie cutter; because then we sort of think ‘That’s not a very useful meta description’.

It’s not that we are doing away meta description, we use it more now than we did, say 7-8 years ago. At the same, we think it has to be useful before we’ll use meta description. So the best thing you could do is to make a really useful meta description and then you’re more likely to see that instead of a snippet from a page.

If you don’t want to bother, that’s completely fine, too. We’ll just try to do whatever we think it’s the smartest and the best for users.

Hopefully, users will click through and find your content.

Related posts:

1. In some queries I can see the date of the post/article in the description snippet (at Google search). Why? Can I tell Google not to use it? If yes, how?
2. Are titles and description tags helpful to increase the organic CTR – clicks generated from organic (unpaid) search – which in turn will help in better ranking with a personalized search perspective?
3. How do meta geo tags influence the search results?

It’s a fact. Amit Singhal has talked about it in the New York Times that we believe that there are some queries that deserve freshness. QDF was how he talked about it and that is fact, not fiction.

Related posts:

1. “Excessive white space” in the HTML source is bad. Fact, myth or somewhere in between?
2. Do dates in the URLs of blogs or websites help determine freshness of the content or is it largely ignored?
3. Seeing as the “link:” search query is hardly ever accurate, what would your favorite/preferred way to check for inbound links be if you were a webmaster?

You are absolutely right, it does happen and most of the time when it happens, it’s because that’s not original content. So, if you get an affiliate feed and it might have images, it might not have images, and you have the same content on your page, your e-commerce product page as 400 other sites, it’s hard to distinguish yourself.

You have to ask ‘Where is my value add, what does my affiliate site or my site that doesn’t have original content add compared to these other hundreds of sites’.

Whenever possible, I urge you to try to have original content, try to have a really unique value add. Don’t just take an affiliate feed, create a site that is fly by night and now there’s no reason why anybody wants to stumble on your site.

Typically, it’s best if you can find some way to have some kind of unique angle and not just the exact same stuff that everybody else has on their webpage, as well.

Related posts:

1. Hi Matt, what are your opinions on optimizing an Ecommerce website where the main pages/products may not necessarily be rich in content?
2. A question to non-intended duplicate content: If an online shop can be reached through several TLDs (like .de, .at, .ch) and the only difference is the currency, (and necessarily the checkout process) does Google consider this duplicate content? What can be done?
3. Are different sites treated differently? E.G. are blogs treated differently than e-commerce sites? Does Google attempt to figure out the context of a site or are all websites equal?

Good question. Not that I’m aware of, Chris (name of the person that asked the question). We will index millions of pages if we think a site is sufficiently good and has a sufficient amount of content. You are very unlikely to bump up against a limit in our index.

It is purely how useful we think your pages are, which is determined in large part by how much PageRank you have, how many people link to you and what the reputation of those pages is. If there is a limit, I’m not aware of it; I really kind of doubt that there is.We tend to just crawl as much of the site as we think we can use and we budget that relative to the all the other sites and how useful we think a site is and how many people are linking to it.

So, as far as I’m aware, there’s no limit. I hope that helps.

Related posts:

1. Why does Google crawl/index blogs (specifically sites notified by “WordPress XMLRPC pings”) so much faster than a “normal” site submitting a revised Sitemap? What is the impact of that on the overall “quality” of the index?
2. Is it a good thing to put’ nofollow’ in links to a disclaimer, privacy statements and other pages like that with the internal PageRank in mind? I hear different stories about this.
3. If you have a lot of blog content for a new section of a site (100+ pages), is it best to release it over a period of time or is it fine to just unleash 100 pages?

Well, way, way, way back in the dawn of Google, you know it was funny because people would rank in different countries based only on the TLD. So, FR meant that you’re French. But, that’s all that they knew.

Back in 2000/2001 type time frame, we started to look at where the servers were located, its IP address. To say ‘Oh, well, it doesn’t end in .fr, but it is located in France according to its IP address’, so maybe this is really useful for French users. That’s the primary way that you have an impact on Google’s rankings.

You know, if you’re just in the United States, your site is in the United States, you’ve never been outside of the United States, you might never notice any of these factors.

But, where your server is located, whether it is in the US, or France or Germany or Britain, or Canada or anywhere else, can determine our rankings. For example, if you go to Google.Com, and type in ‘bank’, you’ll get different results than if you go to Google.Com.Au and you type in ‘bank’, or Google.Com.UK.

We do absolutely try to return the most relevant results to each user in each country. And server location, in terms of IP address, is a factor in that.

Related posts:

1. What is the best way to serve different content according to user country IP (legal reasons)?
2. Hi Matt, could you confirm whether the geographic location of the web host has any significant ranking factors for organic SEO?
3. What impact does “page bloat” have on Google rankings? Most of the winners in SEO seem to have very simple pages (very few images, HTML-only design), sometimes to the detriment to the user in a poorly designed page.

Well, it’s unclear if you’re asking how many levels deep it is in terms of directories, or far it is from the root page. One way that you can make sure that Google reaches those pages is link from your root page, your main page directly to the deep page that you wanted to be crawled.

So we tend not to think about how many directories deep the page is, but we do look at how much PageRank a page has. So, if a lot of people link to your root page, then you can link to sub pages and those sub pages can link to other sub pages. At some point, then we’ll stop crawling.

One thing that you can do is you can make sure that as many pages as possible are within just a few clicks from your root page. A good way to do it is to prioritize which pages you think are the most important; either they convert the way that you want or they have really good ROI, so, you know, don’t treat all of your pages the same.

If you’ve got a few that are real money-makers, try to surface those and get them kind of linked to from your root page, so that you can make most out of it.

Related posts:

1. There seems to be little impact on visitors where in the site’s structure a given page is, so: Is it better to keep key content pages close to root, or have them deep within a topical funnel-structure, e.g. food/fast-food/burgers/hamburgers.php?
2. Hi Matt, what are your opinions on optimizing an Ecommerce website where the main pages/products may not necessarily be rich in content?
3. If you have a lot of blog content for a new section of a site (100+ pages), is it best to release it over a period of time or is it fine to just unleash 100 pages?

No, it doesn’t. ‘Link:’ only shows a sample, a subsample of backlinks that we know about. It’s a random sample; it’s not like we only show the high PageRank backlinks. That’s what we used to do, and then anyone who had PageRank 4 or below, wasn’t able to see their backlinks; because they weren’t in a high PageRank, they weren’t getting high PageRank links.

We made it more fair by randomizing which backlinks we would show, and also sort of doubled the number of backlinks we were going to show at that time.

Now, what’s interesting is that, if you only show links that flow PageRank or that we trust or that don’t have nofollow, then people could kind of reverse-engineer that and say ‘Oh, I’ll try to get the links that are really valuable’. So we show the links that do carry a lot of “credit” in our system, and we do show the links that we don’t really trust or don’t really carry a lot of “credit” in our system.

It’s just truly a random sample of stuff that’s just nofollow, stuff that’s followed, stuff that we do believe a lot, stuff we don’t trust as much etc.

Just because you don’t see one particular link in ‘link:’ doesn’t mean that it doesn’t or does flow reputation, PageRank, whatever you want to refer to as.

If it’s your own site, you can use Google’s Webmaster console, sign up and get a very complete list, a vast majority of links that we know about that you can even download as a CSV file.

If you really do want to want to get a really good idea of backlinks, that’s the place to go and get a pretty exhaustive list of links according to Google.

Related posts:

1. Seeing as the “link:” search query is hardly ever accurate, what would your favorite/preferred way to check for inbound links be if you were a webmaster?
2. As Google’s algorithms evolve, is it better to have exceptional links and mediocre content, or exceptional content and mediocre links? By links I mean inbound link quality/quantity. Can you sites with awesome content outrank mediocre/established sites?
3. Do you feel that the widespread and blanket use of nofollow tags is devaluing Google’s search algorithms? Examples such as Wikipedia, where ALL external links are nofollow. Does Wikipedia mean nothing to Google’s algorithms? Do Google take into account quality factors from nofollowed links when the links come from the well established authority websites, such as Wikipedia?